


starving for some spiritual truth

by Rayellah



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon, petty crime
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 10:10:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6562219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rayellah/pseuds/Rayellah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're different now, the both of them. Parts of people with empty spaces inside. It's impossible to have had someone like the Spirit of the Ring in their lives and not come out different on the other side of such an experience. For better, or for worse. For better <em>and</em> for worse.</p><p>Or: Ryou, Malik, and hunger.</p><p>(Or: Ryou and Malik try to learn to be real people, and attempt to navigate their shared and respective losses.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing with themes of "love as consumption" and "hunger as a metaphor for loss manifesting as a literal insatiable hunger." This fic will be full Angstshipping, and it will also focus heavily on past Tendershipping and Thiefshipping, with much more minor Eclipseshipping. I tagged the first two but not the third one because while Thief and Tender are highly relevant to the fic's progression, nearly if not as much as the main ship, Eclipse is more minor.

Here is the sum total of the Spirit’s belongings, in the end:

  1. Hunger
  2. His ghosts



He leaves both of them to Ryou, in a way. Not consciously — in reality his last thought had been _oh_ , nothing as articulate as the screams of the damned. And he's always been one of the damned. But he's never screamed. He'd thought _oh_ and he’d thought about the idea of Ryou’s rage, which he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen. Then he’d fallen. Just another dead man from Kul Elna, dying just a few thousand years after everyone else.

Zorc Necrophades had a lot more to say on the matter. But nobody would ask.

 _I’m his_ , said the demon to Ryou Bakura. _And you’re his. And that —_ the scuttling of insect legs over an empty plate, a collection of picked-clean bones, a knowledgeable jerk of demonic claws towards Ryou’s concave stomach — _that’s his too._

Ryou didn’t say anything. This is still at the point where Ryou thought if he just ignored it–

But it’s rude, you know, to ignore your tenant’s gifts. The Spirit of the Ring said so, even though nobody listened. The Spirit who shared his name said so, even though nobody asked.

 _He loved you,_ the demon said as it left Ryou’s body forever, agonizingly slowly, pinching Ryou’s hair between gentle claws and sounding almost wistful. _I love you. We hate to see you like this, Ryou. Get up. Eat._

“It doesn’t help,” Ryou said. His hair fell out a little between his fingers. He’d given up on trying to ignore it. Given up on eating. Given up on ever feeling anything besides hungry.

“Get out,” he said. “You said you’re his, so – just – I don't want anything to do with you –”

 _He was too soft,_ the demon said. The sound of that voice growing weaker, fainter. Ghosts and ghosts. He really will be gone soon. _I tried to make him sharp enough to be useful, to give him something like claws. But in a way he was always too soft._

Ryou started crying, sudden and soft, and that was the only sound that anyone could hear: low gulping sobs, his hand extended with a horrible tenderness into empty space.

The demon died with the Spirit.

In a way, he should be glad to be rid of both of them, if there even ever was a ‘both of them,’ Spirit and demon, and not just a _him_ , one single, indistinct being that sits in the back of his mind and plots and plans and hurts and gets very angry when it loses, one being that used to be two, once, but isn't, anymore.

The point is: he should be glad that he's alone in his head again.

Shouldn't he?

-*-

Malik is waiting for the silence to break.

“... So,” Yuugi says, two days after everything comes to a close at last. He’s going to be heading back to Japan soon, he says. He says, and Malik supposes he believes. The concept of an ending is so silent, so _final_ , that Malik feels like there should be an echo. That everything _besides_ that silence should echo like a thrown stone in the widest part of a buried tomb. “It’s over.” He’s touching his neck, where the chain of the Puzzle once sat, seemingly unaware that he’s doing so. Malik, curled into a tiny ball in the chair by the couch, pulls at the bottom of his shirt.

“Yes,” he says. The silence returns.

“Do you—” his former enemy starts, and then stops, changes direction. “You miss the spirit of the Ring, the other Bakura.” It isn’t a question. He’s so perceptive, isn’t he? Always able to pinpoint others’ hurts. Perhaps it comes from his own hurts, but Malik doesn’t feel like asking that.

“He was my equal,” Malik says immediately. “My equal, entirely. I had never — had. An equal. Before. The other me was... he _couldn’t_ have been my equal. He was something else. I miss _him_ , too. I know I shouldn't. Isis says I shouldn't, but I do.” He doesn’t look up, and doesn’t meet Yuugi’s eyes. He can tell Yuugi's considering how to respond and so Malik waits, swallows, wishes for something to fill the silence or the steady presence of Rishid by his side — the feeling of being known. Instead, he simply _waits_. It’s all he can do. All he’s been able to do.

(What _is_ redemption, anyway?)

“... I’m sorry,” Malik adds. “I was so angry and resentful. I didn’t know. That there was a better way.”

Yuugi shrugs one shoulder, shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I’ve forgiven you. And I’m sorry, too.”

Malik sucks his lips between his teeth, bobs his head in a bird’s-nod. “I like it,” he says, “just being me, without the resentment and my other half. I didn’t know about all the good things that there were, or I suppose it would be more accurate to say I didn’t pay any attention to them, and now I’m making up for lost time. Besides—” he stops, wrings his hands like snapping a neck.

“What kinds of good things?” Yuugi asks and smiles as he does — lopsided, wry. Maybe just a little bit uncertain.

“Casinos. 70s rock. About sixty different kinds of sandwich cookies. Ketchup potato chips. Baklava. Turducken.”

“Tur—”

“A bird,” Malik says. “Stuffed inside another bird.”

 _That's what it used to feel like, with my evil self there,_ Malik doesn't say.

Yuugi snorts through his nose. Malik nods. The silence lowers over them, but not as bad as it was before. “You sound hungry.”

Malik looks momentarily confused. “I suppose I am.”


	2. indeterminable

He’s only here because Yuugi recommended it. He supposes, then, that he’s _really_ friends with Yuugi now, if he’s taking advice from him. But: Yuugi recommended it, and Malik sees the value. Ryou would _understand_ , maybe, possibly, his experience would be different but he would understand, he’d get it. Maybe. Yuugi said, Yuugi said. Isis had even agreed, and that spoke volumes, her agreement, the way her uncertain expression had wrapped itself around the shape of her words, that she trusted him to return to Japan on his own and not… well. And not — _well_.

He feels something with insect-spindly legs creeping against the backs of his eyes but when he blinks, it’s gone. It felt like hunger but lately, everything feels like hunger. He isn’t surprised. Times when he’s not hungry feel like an intermission more than a respite. Lights on, curtain lowered, and eyes visible. He feels like that’s part of a quote, or a paraphrase of a quote, but he can’t remember where it came from. He doesn’t much care, though. It was always his sister who loved dead words. Bakura had loved them, too. The spirit, not Ryou, though he supposed Ryou might love them too. Probably not in the way the spirit did. That is to say: hungrily.

He’s called Ryou Bakura to his hotel room. Yuugi had recommended it — or, _well_ , Yuugi had recommended they talk. He hadn’t specified a location. But Marik knows the value of the home field advantage, and doesn’t want to meet Ryou on his. ( _Meet_ , that’s the word chosen because he hadn’t met him before, not in the way he’d met the Spirit. He couldn’t even call them acquaintances at this point, _oh_ , what a thought.)

Not that a hotel room could count as _Malik's_ home field either, but at least this way they’ll be on even ground.

It’s raining outside, but there’s still a knock on the hotel door. Malik hadn’t expected that, expected instead a phone call from the front desk telling him someone had arrived, but no. There’s a knock on the door, and Malik opens it, sees Ryou Bakura standing in the hallway looking like a drowned rat. His hair is plastered to his head. Malik wonders how he got in, this hotel wasn’t the nicest place in the world but it did have clean carpets, and likely wouldn’t take kindly to anyone dripping water all over the place. Still, he holds open the hotel room door and lets Ryou in. It would be rude not to. Probably.

“It’s good to see you,” Ryou says, and Malik doesn’t know how to take that, so he just nods in return, doesn’t say a word because any words he could think of sound just a little off. It’s not that he’s unhappy, seeing Ryou (he was the one who arranged this, after all, Malik, Malik, Malik, alone in his head, and isn’t that just the problem—) ( _The other half of me is dead_ , Malik thinks, _he’s dead, and I let the pharaoh kill him, wanted him to kill him_.)

He lets go of the doorknob clumsily, rings tapping against the metal as his hand falls uselessly to his side. In the guttering light of the streetlamps outside obscured by rainfall, he can’t see anything except for a the outline of Ryou’s features (so like someone else’s features, someone else who is dead, dead, _dead_ , and Ryou looks like he feels likewise — wait, no; he’s approaching; Malik looks away).

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

_I have nothing to say, even now._

Nothing he can put into words, anyway.

“It’s dark,” Malik says, as if he just noticed. As if he wasn’t the one who’d been sitting alone in the shadows, letting the room grow dark around him. As if, as if. “I’ll turn on a light.”

And he does, though his hands shake a little. The room is illuminated suddenly, and he blinks twice before his eyes can adjust.

“It was his fault,” Ryou says, as if continuing from some conversation the two of them haven’t started yet. “Not mine, not yours, not—”

Malik doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he doesn’t,

“Yuugi said you miss him, too,” Ryou goes on, and Malik is surprised at his earnestness, the way Ryou Bakura can lay out all of his weaknesses in some sort of order, like tools. Which is either surprising or pitiful, depending on how willing Ryou is to let things cripple him. The dust has settled, ashes scattering in the wind and mingling with the world.

“I do,” Malik responds. He doesn’t know what else there is to say.

“Did you know — what he thought of you?”

“I hadn’t thought to ask.”

“Do you want to?” Ryou asks, and Malik feels his breath catch in his throat, like a bird trying to take flight. _Oh, do you, do you? Would that make any of this better, knowing what the Ring’s spirit thought of you?_

“Tell me.”

“I think he — he wanted you to have to pick parts of him out from between your teeth for years after he got what he wanted from you. He wanted to _happen_ to you,” Ryou says. “And he did happen to you, didn’t he? You made sure of it as much as he did.”

 _How much does he know?_ Malik does not dare ask. “Like the aftermath of a murder,” he says instead.

“Nightmares about the ugliness of what he is, was, for days and days, maybe forever,” Ryou goes on, and then nods. “Me, too. I write letters to him, sometimes. I probably shouldn’t, I don’t think he’ll get them, I’m not even sure there’s anything of him left, but I write them anyway.”

Malik nods, he gets it, oh he _gets_ it. Like a splinter that never really works its way out of the skin, that stings again whenever he brushes against someone else, and _why should you, Malik? Why should you ever forget when you loved him like that?_

Loved him like how a stab wound throbs, incessant and painful and raw. So yes, of course it was the hungriest he’s ever been—!

Except.

That wasn’t what Ryou said.

“Did he take part of you, too?” Ryou asks.

“I think so,” Malik responds.

“I think so, too,” Ryou says, quiet and serious. “Do you want to do something about it?”

“Not _about_ it.” Malik shakes his head. “ _With_ it.”


End file.
